2 User-Friendly Plugins to Hide WooCommerce Products

Sometimes you don’t want every single product available to the public, especially if you’re running something like a wholesale or members-only store (though the use cases definitely don’t stop there).

In this post, I’ll show you how to hide WooCommerce products using three different methods, depending on the level at which you want to hide your products. By the end of this article, you’ll be able to hide:

A single product using core WooCommerce functionality

An entire category of products using the WooCommerce Protected Categories plugin

Which way of hiding WooCommerce products is right for you?

I’ll keep this brief because you probably have a good idea of which is right for your situation already.

But in a nutshell:

The core WooCommerce functionality is helpful if you just need to hide a single product. But it’s difficult to manage if you want to hide multiple WooCommerce products.

WooCommerce Protected Categories is good if you want to just create some hidden products in an otherwise public store.

WooCommerce Private Store is good if you want to make every single product hidden.

With either plugin, you can then further choose between:

Automatically unlocking the hidden product(s) for all logged in users.

Automatically unlocking the hidden product(s) for specific logged in users or roles.

Requiring users to enter a password to view the hidden product(s)

Below, I’ll take you through how to use each plugin to hide WooCommerce products, as well as the core WooCommerce functionality.

How to hide a single WooCommerce product

Note: when you use this method, your product is hidden from the shop pages. But if a user gets their hands on a direct link, they’ll still be able to access the product. For that reason, this method is not a good approach if you actually want to make the product private – not just hidden.

Also, this method isn’t very efficient if you need to hide multiple products, as you’ll need to manually edit every single product. If you want to hide lots of products, it’s much more efficient to just bulk assign them to a category and hide that category using the next method.

If you’re ok with the product still being accessible by direct URL, you can hide it by editing the Catalog visibility option under Publish and choosing Hidden:

Then, you can configure how your user and role protected categories function by going to WooCommerce → Settings → Products → Protected Categories. Here, you need to choose what happens when a logged out or guest user tries to access a hidden category or one of its products:

How to hide your entire WooCommerce store

Now it’s time for the third, and most private, way to hide WooCommerce products.

If you want to hide all of your products from the public, you’ll need the WooCommerce Private Store plugin installed and activated.